Time Strategies

Pink Floyd 1969, Image by Ian Burt via Flickr (Feb 18, 2006)

The image above captures the well-known band, Pink Floyd. Among many amazing songs is one in particular that just feels different: Time

Have you ever felt like you wake up and then the day is over? And it just keeps repeating? Do you ever stop and realize that a fifth of our life is over? And with how fast it went by, one can only stop and think about how fast the next 20 years will go. 

Time by Pink Floyd is basically about this realization. We procrastinate so much, and wait for the next thing to happen. We wait for the weekend, for summer, for next year. But when we're in our sixties, these will be the days we wish we still had.

So now that we're all having an existential crisis, how do we prevent ourselves from "wasting" our time?

Understanding how short life really is tends to be a good first step. Then, we realize how important it is to spend our time doing things we enjoy, things we love. Silly, but YOLO is actually a really good thing to live by. When you're old and dying, you want to look back on these years and feel proud, happy, and content. 

So let me ask you one thing. Is what you're doing right now making you proud? Is it making you happy? Will you be content with spending your time the way you are right now?

If not, don't panic. You can change it. You have the power over your own life. Picture your ideal self. What do they look like? What are they doing? And why aren't you living that?

I'm not perfect. Even I haven't started living fully the way I'd ideally like to. But understanding we can, and we should now, is a pretty good push to start.

So. Time management. I have two tips from past learning and experience that I think will help:

1. When you have a bad gut-feeling about something, that's a sign telling you to just. do. it. Get it over with now. 99% of the time, you'll find that the actual thing is not nearly as bad as you'd anticipated. When you're done, reward yourself. There's nothing like positive reinforcement!

2. Stop doing things that don't bring you joy or aren't on the path to bringing you joy. I understand some classes (organic chemistry 2.. yuck) we really just don't have a choice, but maybe there are ways we can make the unbearable a little more.. bearable. I've found that the best way to do this is to customize the course around you. Put the information in terms that make sense to you, give things meaning, assign them characters to get a sense for how they interact.

These two things combined will take you in a fresh, new direction, and will hopefully make room for time you can use to be who you want to be.